Usd Ghaba
Aleppo · 1233
I
Ibn al-Athir
Ibn al-Athir
1160 CE–1233 CE · Mosul
Izz al-Din Abu'l-Hasan Ali ibn Muhammad al-Jazari, known as Ibn al-Athir, was a Sunni historian and hadith scholar (a specialist in the reported sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad) of the Zangid and Ayyubid era. He is best remembered for al-Kamil fi'l-ta'rikh ("The Complete History"), a chronicle of the world from creation down to his own day that remains one of the most cited Arabic histories of the medieval Near East, including its account of the Crusades and the early Mongol invasions.
Sources report that he was born in 555 AH (1160 CE) at Jazirat ibn Umar on the Tigris (today Cizre, in Turkey), into a family that served the Zangid rulers of Mosul; two of his brothers, Majd al-Din and Diya al-Din, were also noted scholars. Around the age of twenty-one he settled with his father in Mosul, which became his lifelong base. He travelled to Baghdad, accompanied Saladin's forces in Syria for a time, and spent periods in Damascus and Aleppo before returning to Mosul, where he died in 630 AH (1233 CE).
In Islamic belief he was a transmitter of tradition, not a religious authority of the first rank; later biographers count him a Shafi'i in law and Ash'ari in creed, though such labels are how the tradition classified him rather than matters he debated himself. Besides al-Kamil he compiled Usd al-ghaba, a dictionary of the Prophet's Companions; al-Lubab, on Arab genealogy; and al-Bahir, a history of the Zangid atabegs (Turkic military governors) of Mosul.
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Stop 1 of 51181–1233Studied / Settled
MosulמוסולNorthern Iraq — Kurdish Jewish region
What they did here
Around age twenty-one (c. 1181) he is reported to have settled with his father in Mosul to pursue history and the religious sciences. Mosul remained his lifelong scholarly base, to which he repeatedly returned and where he died. The exact year of settling is an approximation derived from his reported age. (Britannica; Encyclopaedia Iranica; EBSCO Research Starters.)
About Mosul
Mosul is a city on the Tigris in northern Iraq; the ruins of ancient Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, lie on its eastern side. Arab Muslim forces took it in the 630s or early 640s. It later flourished under the Hamdanids and, from 1127, as the seat of the Zengid dynasty, and it was a centre of Islamic scholarship where the historian Ibn al-Athir lived and worked. The Mongols sacked it in 1262, and the Ottomans later ruled it for centuries. Its mixed population included Assyrian Christians and an old Jewish community, and in the seventeenth century Asenath Barzani led a yeshiva there. Nearly all Iraqi Jews left for Israel in 1950-52. The Islamic State held it in 2014-2017.
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Ibn al-Athir’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
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The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Ibn al-Athir’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.